iGEM, a premiere undergraduate Synthetic Biology competition, is one of the most important events in my college life; it is hosted by MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) every year since 2005. Click here to know more about the competition.

In the competition, we organize a team (undergraduate students only) to design a project based on synthetic biology and realize the idea by ourselves. Most experiments are done through the summer vacation, but other things necessary to the competition, such as human practice, website designing, poster designing, will altogether take us about a year.

As a competition, its duration is really long and very time-consuming; we experienced many difficulties and failures and many teammates quit. I’m glad I didn’t give up and the team finally conquered all the obstacles. I represented the team to give the final presentation in November, 2013, MIT.

In 2013, our team made a biological oscillator, which can release propionate (recently reported to be able to relieve hypertension) periodically to cope with the morning surge of patients with hypertension.

Here is the design of the biological oscillator.

Biological Oscillator

Hybrid promoter is the combination of the activation operator site from araBAD promoter and the repression operator site from lacZYA promoter. It can be activated by the AraC protein in the presence of arabinose and repressed by the LacI protein in the absence of IPTG. The mechanism of the oscillator is that we can activate the promoter by adding Arabinose and IPTG to the medium and thus results in the transcription of each component of the circuit. The increased production of AraC in the presence of Arabinose results in a positive feedback loop that increases promoter activity. However, the concurrent increase in production of LacI results in a linked negative feedback loop that decreases promoter activity. The two feedback loops with opposite effects can then drive an oscillatory behavior. Click here to know more about our project!

We designed and made a poster (Figure 1) for our  porject. Click the picture, then you can view details in our poster.

Figure 1. 2013_iGEM Poster

This experience is unforgettable! I really enjoyed working in a team, and most importantly, I learned how to solve problems when getting stuck in a research and how to express myself properly and effectively in a team.

Team HUST-China 2013

I met many friends during the Jamboree, MIT. This is Alex from the University of Marburg.